I passed over Lethal Legacies: Traps of the World Before a number of times, because I presumed it was just another Grimtooth's Traps -style collection of Total-Party-Killing meat-grinder traps.

It's not.

Lethal Legacies is as much about puzzles and challenges as straight damage. For example, the first "trap" in the book it's a teleporting door puzzle. Throughout the book, there's a real sense of thought and creativity, and even the truly dangerous traps are more than just "Click. Oops. Splortch! Ha Ha!"

Well-written, well laid-out, with good illustrations -- if you want traps to be flavorful challenges in your adventures, instead of just brute-force death sentences -- if you want something of the flavor of the Indiana Jones movies, or of the Lara Croft computer games in your fantasy world, Lethal Legacies points the way.

I'm sorry it took the sale to make me really look at this product. Had I known what it was truly like, I would've paid full price for it.

This was hte book that made me regret paying 40 bucks for grimtooth's new trap book. --- and i really liked those traps.

But this book does something that I find a problem with Grimtooth, it makes the traps more practical and gives you teh hsitory and story behind each one. If you're tired of pcs always falling down pits, get this book.

LIKED: A vareity of traps and more creative punishments than lethality.

I saw this one a while ago, but put off getting it because it seemed to me like another instance of Grimtooth's Traps or Traps & Treachery, books which, while they do their topic well, see little use in my game. But being intrigued by the subtitle "Traps of the World Before", I decided to give it a go.

The book does, indeed, have traps. But these are not merely traps in the Grimtooth "let's see how high we can get the body count while the GM gleefully grins over the fiendishness of the trap." These "traps" are as much artifacts of a bygone age as they are mere traps.

The trap writeups leave room for dealing with the challenges on both the player ingenuity level and the PC skill level.

LIKED: Traps are flavorful and thus seem easier to insert in a game; with Grimtooth and T&T, I feel like I am either struggling to explain the presence of a trap or like I am "breaking the fourth wall" by broadcasting the presence of a GM. These traps seemed much more sensible, much more plausible as possible artifacts of an ancient culture.

DISLIKED: Multiple instances of the affect/effect gaffe (a majority of instances of "affect" should have been "effect".) This is my personal pet peeve of grammar errors.